Kanye West's Yeezy Season 3 Fashion Show

Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 Fashion show is a unique form of creative communication. The fashion show was performed, and it truly was a performance, in the Madison square garden, New York City, February 2016. It was not your normal catwalk, with most picturing slender models gracefully cascading down the runway. Kanye West did something a little more reflective. His show was a challenging and trivial experimentation of political boundaries in high fashion. West uses creative elements of ambiguity and juxtaposition to open up the eyes of his audience to worldly issues.

Art and creativity possess a “beautifully humanizing capacity that encourages people to see how seemingly unrelated social injustices and problems transmit into their own lives”

The Season 3 fashion show is built to resemble Paul Lowe’s 1995 photograph of a Southern Rwanda refugee camp. The photograph is from the Rwandan Genocide and shows “thousands of Hutus packed into a small area of the Kibeho camp, one day after Tutsi soldiers had massacred thousands of people in that very place” (Laurent & Moakley, 2016). Kanye together with Vanessa Beecroft recreated it as the setting for their artistic production, ‘The Life of Pablo’ listening party and Yeezy Season 3 Fashion show. The use of this image is creative in communicating more than a materialistic vision or pleasure (Walpert, 2016). In West’s fashion show, female and male models, dressed in relaxed ensembles from the singer’s new line stand with a powerful stillness, occasionally displaying subtle weary movements. Channeling the depth, gloom, and misery of Lowe’s photograph, the models were washed in a haze of smoke and piercing spotlights. Toward the end of the show, some raised their fists in a symbol of defiance for black power, while West lead the performance for over an hour. He effectively contrasts two contradictory events: a high-end fashion show and a refugee camp. A juxtaposition of models parading a designer’s new line, above hundreds of black models, crowded in on the floor. To the eye, a sea of people draped in warm, distressed earth tones shockingly resembles a refugee camp. The audience is suddenly transformed into remembering that while this million-dollar fashion show is occurring, parts of the world are awash with war and poverty. The “need to communicate with a larger audience or public is usually at the centre of most artistic effort” (Farrow, 2016), and by momentarily changing society’s vision of a fashion show, this is no